Jerrold Nadler: Gun-Grabbing Leninist

When the “heroic” (and much-decorated) Seventh Cavalry slaughtered hundreds of starving, freezing Indians at Wounded Knee Creek in December 1890, the perpetrators of that massacre weren’t committing an atrocity. Instead, they were exercising what New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler calls “legitimate violence.”

After all, the mass killing was carried out as part of a civilian disarmament exercise – what we would now call a gun “buy-back.” It simply wouldn’t be acceptable for the Sioux to retain any means to defend what little they had left from the government that had expropriated them and driven them from their homes.

During the subsequent war to suppress Philippine independence, the U.S. military slaughtered at least 128,000 Filipinos – another expression of what Nadler describes as the defining characteristic of the nation-state. The same trait was displayed in the aerial fire-bombing campaigns against Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, and Yokohama during World War II, the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of that conflict, the slaughter of tens of thousands of Iraqis on the “Highway of Death” at the end of the first Gulf War, the 78-day terror-bombing of Belgrade in 1999, and the murderous siege of Fallujah (which involved the use of chemical weapons and depleted uranium rounds) in 2004. We shouldn’t neglect the vital role played by Delta Force operators in the mass murder of the Branch Davidians at Mt. Carmel in 1993.

During a recent Capitol Hill press conference, Rep. Nadler urged his colleagues to support confiscation of high-capacity ammo clips legally obtained by American citizens. When a reporter asked if the military should be allowed to keep its high capacity magazines, Nadler decanted a reply that was pure, unfiltered Leninism:

“One of the definitions of a nation state is that the state has a monopoly on legitimate violence. And the state ought to have a monopoly on legitimate violence…. If the premise of your question is that people are going to resist a tyrannical government by shooting machine guns at American troops, that’s insane.”